AVS/Express Helps Physicians in the Treatment of Cancer Patients

Earth Sciences Case Study

AVS/Express is being used to power a suite of sophisticated 3D solutions developed to facilitate the analysis and treatment of prostate cancer by Rosses Medical Systems, a Columbia, Maryland-based medical research, development and consulting firm.

Rosses selected AVS/Express, a comprehensive software development platform, to provide highly interactive 3D data visualization for its Strata Suite, an integrated software system that allows clinicians to plan the placement of Low Dose Rate (LDR) radioactive sources (often referred to as “seeds”) within malignant tissue.

The Strata Suite of products, which provide Image Acquisition, Treatment Planning, and Treatment Quality Assurance (QA) functionality, enable users to acquire images from Ultrasound or CT imaging devices and create 3D models of the patient’s anatomy. The AVS/Express-based application allows the user to simulate the placement of seeds within the patient’s anatomy and visualize the resultant radiation dose delivered to the anatomical target.

“AVS/Express’ visualization libraries are at the core of all our cutting-edge visualization products,” says Dr. Sujat Sukthankar, Rosses Medical Systems’ Vice President of Research and Development. “During the prototyping phase, our development team was quite impressed by the power, flexibility and depth of AVS/Express and its multi-platform capabilities. With AVS/Express, we have been able to create dynamic 3D visualization applications that provide our customers with a robust and easy-to-use tool for planning and assessing LDR prostate cancer treatments. The multi-platform nature of AVS/Express has helped us rapidly develop products that run on SGI workstations as well as Windows -based desktop computers.”

“With AVS/Express,” continues Sukthankar, “we were amazed by the speed with which we could prototype and implement advanced visualization concepts into our applications.” Future enhancements to the application suite will include modules for image guided surgery and biopsy guidance.

This screen shot shows the ultrasound, placement of seeds and radiation dose in 2D and 3D.

This image shows the CT images used for post-treatment evaluation.

This image shows the imported ultrasound images used for prostate treatment planning.